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vcf-validator

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Validator for the Variant Call Format (VCF) implemented using C++11.

It includes all the checks from the vcftools suite as well as additional lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of the VCF input. If any inconsistencies are found, they are classified in one of the following categories:

  • Errors: Violations of the VCF specification
  • Warnings: An indication that something weird happened (commas were used instead of colons to split ids) or a recommendation is not followed (missing meta-data)

Please read the wiki for more details about checks already implemented.

Download

We recommend using the latest release for the most stable experience using vcf-validator. Along with the release notes, you will find the executables vcf_validator and vcf_debugulator, which allow to validate and fix VCF files. Executables for Linux, macOS and Windows are available.

Run

Validator

vcf-validator accepts both compressed and non-compressed input VCF files. Supported compression formats are .gz and .bz2. For other formats such as .zip, the zcat command and a pipe can be used (see below).

Reading uncompressed files:

  • File path as argument: vcf_validator -i /path/to/file.vcf
  • Standard input: vcf_validator < /path/to/file.vcf
  • Standard input from pipe: cat /path/to/file.vcf | vcf_validator

Reading compressed files:

  • File path as argument: vcf_validator -i /path/to/compressed_file.vcf.gz
  • Standard input: vcf_validator < /path/to/compressed_file.vcf.bz2
  • Standard input from pipe: zcat /path/to/compressed_file.vcf.zip | vcf_validator

The validation level can be configured using -l / --level. This parameter is optional and accepts 3 values:

  • error: Display only syntax errors
  • warning: Display both syntax and semantic, both errors and warnings (default)
  • stop: Stop after the first syntax error is found

Different types of validation reports can be written with the -r / --report option. Several ones may be specified in the same execution, using commas to separate each type (without spaces, e.g.: -r summary,database,text).

  • summary: Write a human-readable summary report to a file. This includes one line for each type of error and the number of occurrences, along with the first line that shows that type of error (default)
  • text: Write a human-readable report to a file, with one description line for each VCF line that has an error.
  • database: Write structured report to a database file. The database engine used is SQLite3, so the results can be inspected manually, but they are intended to be consumed by the debugulator.

Each report is written into its own file and it is named after the input file, followed by a timestamp. The default output directory is the same as the input file's if provided using -i, or the current directory if using the standard input; it can be changed with the -o / --outdir option.

Debugulator

There are some simple errors that can be automatically fixed. The most common error is the presence of duplicate variants. The needed parameters are the original VCF and the report generated by a previous run of the validator with the option -r database.

The fixed VCF will be written into the standard output, which you can redirect to a file, or use the -o / --output option and specify the desired file name.

The logs about what the debugulator is doing will be written into the error output. The logs may be redirected to a log file using 2>debugulator_log.txt or completely discarded with 2>/dev/null.

Assembly Checker

vcf-assembly-checker assesses the correctness of a VCF file with respect to a FASTA file (that should contain the reference sequence). The assembly checker reads the CHR, POS and REF columns from the VCF, and for each line, looks into the FASTA file to see if the REF allele matches that region. A VCF file is considered valid if all the variants match the sequence in the FASTA file.

vcf-assembly-checker requires a FASTA-index file with extension .fai for efficient reading of the FASTA file.

Different types of validation reports can be written with the -r / --report option. Several ones may be specified in the same execution, using commas to separate each type (without spaces, e.g.: -r summary,valid,text).

  • summary - Logs the number of matches, total variants checked and percentage of correctness of VCF file on the terminal.
  • valid - Write valid lines (including meta-info lines) from the input VCF file into an output file.
  • text - Write a human readable into file, containing errors and warnings generated while checking a VCF file.

Each report is written into its own file and it is named after the input file, followed by a timestamp. The default output directory is the same as the input file's if provided using -i, or the current directory if using the standard input; it can be changed with the -o / --outdir option.

Examples

Simple example: vcf_validator -i /path/to/file.vcf

Full example: vcf_validator -i /path/to/file.vcf -l stop -r database,stdout -o /path/to/output/folder/

Debugulator example:

vcf_validator -i /path/to/file.vcf -r database -o /path/to/write/report/
vcf_debugulator -i /path/to/file.vcf -e /path/to/write/report/vcf.errors.timestamp.db -o /path/to/fixed.vcf 2>debugulator_log.txt

Assembly Checker example:

vcf_assembly_checker -i /path/to/file.vcf -f /path/to/fasta_file.fa
vcf_assembly_checker -f /path/to/fasta.fa -r text < /path/to/file.vcf

Build

If you would like to use an unreleased version of vcf-validator, you can build it under 4 platforms: Docker (generates Linux binary without installing dependencies), Linux, macOS and Windows. A statically linked executable will be generated, which means you won't need to install any dependencies to run it.

Docker

The easiest way to build vcf-validator is using the Docker image provided with the source code. This will create an executable that can be run on any Linux machine.

  1. Install and configure Docker following their tutorial.
  2. Create the Docker image:
    1. Clone this Git repository: git clone https://github.com/EBIvariation/vcf-validator.git
    2. Move to the folder the code was downloaded to: cd vcf-validator
    3. Build the image: docker build -t ebivariation/vcf-validator docker/. Please replace ebivariation with your user account if you plan to push this image to Docker Hub.
  3. Build the executable running docker run -v ${PWD}:/tmp ebivariation/vcf-validator. Again, replace ebivariation with your user name if necessary.

Executables will be created in the build/bin subfolder.

Linux

The build has been tested on the following compilers:

  • Clang 3.9 to 5.0
  • GCC 4.8 to 6.0

Dependencies

We strongly recommend to install most of the dependencies using the command ./install_dependencies.sh linux, and help can be obtained with ./install_dependencies.sh --help. Please install SQLite3 before running the script.

The following dependencies are managed by the installation script:

Dependency Version
ODB compiler 2.4.0
ODB common runtime 2.4.0
ODB SQLite runtime 2.4.0
bzip2 1.0.6
zlib 1.2.11

A subfolder named linux_dependencies will be created, with all the required libraries copied into it. You will also have to install Boost packages as described in the following section.

Boost

The dependencies are the Boost library core, and its submodules: Boost.filesystem, Boost.iostreams, Boost.program_options, Boost.regex, Boost.log and Boost.system. If you are using Ubuntu, the required packages' names will be libboost-dev, libboost-filesystem-dev, libboost-iostreams, libboost-program-options-dev, libboost-regex-dev and libboost-log-dev.

ODB

Note: You can ignore this section if you are using the install_dependencies.sh script.

You will need to download the ODB compiler, the ODB common runtime library, and the SQLite database runtime library from this page.

ODB requires SQLite3 to be installed. If you are using Ubuntu, the required packages' names will be libsqlite3-0 and libsqlite3-dev.

To install the ODB compiler, the easiest way is to download the .deb or .rpm packages and install them automatically with dpkg or rpm respectively. Both the ODB common runtime and SQLite database runtime libraries can be installed manually running ./configure && make && sudo make install. This will install the libraries in /usr/local/lib.

If you don't have root permissions, please run ./configure --prefix=/path/to/odb/libraries/folder to specify which folder to install ODB in, then make && make install, without sudo. Also you will have to provide the path to ODB while configuring libodb-sqlite using ./configure --with-libodb=/path/to/odb/libraries.

Compile

In order to create the build scripts, please run cmake with your preferred generator. For instance, cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" /path/to/CMakeLists.txt will create Makefiles, and to build the binaries, you will need to run make.

If the ODB libraries were not found during the build, please run sudo updatedb && sudo ldconfig. Also, if ODB has been installed in a non-default location, the option -DEXT_LIB_PATH=/path/to/external/libraries/folder must be also provided to the cmake command.

Binaries will be created in the bin subfolder.

macOS

On macOS the binaries obtained will only have system libraries dynamically linked. This means you will need to install dependencies to build vcf-validator but not to run it.

Dependencies

In order to set up the environment to compile the dependencies, first you need to run brew install cmake ninja boost sqlite3. We strongly recommend to install most of the dependencies using the command ./install_dependencies.sh osx, and help can be obtained with ./install_dependencies.sh --help.

The following dependencies are managed by the installation script:

Dependency Version
ODB compiler 2.4.0
ODB common runtime 2.4.0
ODB SQLite runtime 2.4.0
bzip2 1.0.6
zlib 1.2.11

A subfolder named osx_dependencies will be created, with all the required libraries copied into it.

Now you can easily install the ODB ORM and compression libraries just by running ./install_dependencies.sh osx. You may run ./install_dependencies.sh --help for usage instructions.

Compile

In order to create the build scripts, please run cmake with your preferred generator. For instance, cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" /path/to/CMakeLists.txt will create Makefiles, and to build the binaries, you will need to run make.

Binaries will be created in the bin subfolder.

Windows

On Windows the binaries obtained will only have ODB libraries dynamically linked. We provide a pre-compiled version of these within the repository because they are not easy to build; but if you would like to do it yourself, please check the Miscellaneous section below.

Dependencies

Compression libraries

You will need to download the bzip2 and zlib source code, from here and here respectively.

Boost

The dependencies are the Boost library core, and its submodules: Boost.filesystem, Boost.iostreams, Boost.program_options, Boost.regex, Boost.log and Boost.system. You will need to compile them with zlib and bzip2 support and statically linking the runtime libraries.

  • Download Boost from here and uncompress it
  • From the directory where Boost was uncompressed, run these commands:
bootstrap
.\b2 --with-atomic --with-chrono --with-date_time --with-filesystem --with-log --with-program_options --with-regex --with-system --with-thread --with-iostreams -sBZIP2_SOURCE=path\to\bzip2-1.x.x -sZLIB_SOURCE=path\to\zlib-1.x.x runtime-link=static --build-type=complete
  • Add boost_1_xx_x/stage/lib folder to the environment variable LIB
  • Add boost_1_xx_x folder to the environment variable INCLUDE
ODB

Precompiled libraries of ODB and the ODB SQLite runtime are provided. In order to download headers, simply run the comand install_dependencies.bat, which will create a windows_dependencies folder in the root directory of the project.

Compile

In order to create the build scripts and compile vcf-validator, please run the following commands from the project root folder:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G "NMake Makefiles" /path/to/CMakeLists.txt
nmake

Binaries will be created in the bin subfolder.

In order to run those binaries, you will need to add the lib/windows_specific directory to the PATH. This will allow the dll files inside that directory to be found.

Deliverables

The following binaries are be created after successful build:

  • vcf_validator: VCF validation tool
  • vcf_debugulator: automatic VCF fixing tool
  • vcf_assembly_checker: variant checking tool against FASTA sequence
  • test_validation_suite and derivatives: testing correct behaviour of the tools listed above

Tests

Unit tests can be run using the binary bin/test_validation_suite or, if the generator supports it, a command like make test. The first option may provide a more detailed output in case of test failure.

Note: Tests that require input files will only work when executed with make test or running the binary from the project root folder (not the bin subfolder).

Generate code from descriptors

Code generated from descriptors shall be always up-to-date in the GitHub repository. If changes to the source descriptors were necessary, please generate the Ragel machines C code from .ragel files using:

ragel -G2 src/vcf/vcf_v41.ragel -o inc/vcf/validator_detail_v41.hpp
ragel -G2 src/vcf/vcf_v42.ragel -o inc/vcf/validator_detail_v42.hpp
ragel -G2 src/vcf/vcf_v43.ragel -o inc/vcf/validator_detail_v43.hpp

And the full ODB-based code from the classes definitions using:

odb --include-prefix vcf --std c++11 -d sqlite --generate-query --generate-schema --hxx-suffix .hpp --ixx-suffix .ipp --cxx-suffix .cpp --output-dir inc/vcf/ inc/vcf/error.hpp
mv inc/vcf/error-odb.cpp src/vcf/error-odb.cpp

Miscellaneous

Build ODB Libraries for windows

This section describes how to build the ODB libraries for Windows. You may ignore it if you want to use pre-compiled libraries provided inside the repository. To build those libraries, first download the source code using install_dependencies.bat, which will create the following subfolder inside windows_dependencies:

  • libodb-2.4.0
  • libodb-sqlite-2.4.0
  • sqlite
  • odb (header files only)

You will have to compile libodb-2.4.0, sqlite and then libodb-sqlite-2.4.0. The build has been tested on Visual Studio 2017.

Build ODB runtime

  1. Open libodb-2.4.0/libodb-vc12.sln in VS-Studio. File->Open->Project/Solution.
  2. Retarget the solution file to latest version. Project->Retarget Solution.
  3. Select Build type Release and configuration win32.
  4. Select /MT in Project->Properties->Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation->Runtime Library options.
  5. Build the solution using Build->Build Solution.

Build SQLite for odb-sqlite

  1. Open sqlite/sqlite3-vc12.sln in VS-Studio.
  2. Retarget the solution file.
  3. Select Build type Release and configuration win32.
  4. Select /MT in Project->Properties->Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation->Runtime Library options.
  5. Build the solution using Build->Build Solution.

Build ODB-SQLite runtime

  1. Open libodb-sqlite-2.4.0/libodb-sqlite-vc12.sln in VS-Studio.
  2. Retarget the solution file.
  3. Select Build type Release and configuration win32.
  4. Select /MT in Project->Properties->Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation->Runtime Library options.
  5. Go to Project->Properties->Configuration Properties->VC++ Directories and append these paths to following variables.
    • Executable Directories => path/to/libodb-2.4.0/bin and path/to/sqlite/bin
    • Include Directories => path/to/libodb-2.4.0 and path/to/sqlite
    • Library Directories => path/to/libodb-2.4.0/lib and path/to/sqlite/lib Note the paths should be absolute and the directories will be present within windows_dependencies folder.
  6. Build the solution using Build->Build Solution.

Now you will obtain compiled LIB and DLL files, in the lib and bin folders respectively.